TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

I saw Eamon Evans book, Great Australian Urban Legends whilst looking for things to spend my Christmas gift vouchers on in a local department store and thought it might be a good purchase to help inspire some possible animation ideas with a more Australian flavor. I didn't really have time to give it proper consideration however the blurb on the back sounded promising so I decided to give it a go.

Ryan Reynolds may have only starred in one Deadpool movie to date but, in my opinion, he's already reached Hugh Jackman's status for Wolverine in that it's hard to imagine anyone else playing Deadpool. Thanks largely to all the promotional publicity shorts and TV spots Ryan's been doing backed up by a film that delivers on its promise. The 2016 movie Deadpool is pretty much what I hoped it would be in terms of how Ryan plays the character and how it's funny, self aware humor and fourth wall breaking conversation works so well without ever falling into being a parody of superhero movies.

Paul J. Watson's video, The Truth About Modern Art popped up in my social media stream today. It's basically a rant video denouncing, mainly conceptual art, with a few other similarly criticized art movements/styles/techniques thrown in.

If you're a fan of Charlie Brown and Snoopy then The Peanuts Movie should not disappoint. This new 3D incarnation of Charles Schulz famous characters looks both fresh and modern but also feels as if Charles himself still drew at least half of it by hand himself. A large part of that is the film makers paying a lot of attention to how Charles actually drew his characters and incorporating those details into the CGI animation - such as eyes being on the same side of the head from certain angles when, technically they shouldn't be.

David Bowie 2002 All photos sourced from Wikipedia I've mentioned that I'm a David Bowie fan in passing several times in this blog but other than I stated that Bowie's is the only music I still purchase in CD form you're probably not aware of how important his influence is to me as an artist. With David Bowie's passing the answer to the question "What will Bowie do next?" can never be answered again. It's an important question because that was how Bowie promoted himself through the 1990's and early 2000's and that is what drove my interest in him as an artist after his mainstream success from the 1980's began to decline.

I saw Star Wars The Force Awakens just over a week after its release and, since then, I've been reading what people have had to say about it before writing my own commentary. This won't really be a review so, if you haven't seen it and you're a Star Wars fan, stop reading now. Go see the movie. It's awesome, you'll love it and you won't care about any of the similarities with the original trilogy. In fact those things are part of why it's so good. Don't believe those dicks that say the movie brings nothing new to the table, it does, they're dicks, go and enjoy the film.

Dear #Mashable, #Nerdist, #MamaMia and other sites that over use Auto Play Video Ads, Remember back in the early days of the internet when display ads, pop-up ads and pop-unders ads were largely frowned upon but we eventually got used to these things because they helped make content free? Well I can assure you the same is never going to be said for embeded Auto Play Video Ads. Especially when they're used so poorly by sites such as yours.